The 223 members of the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, awarded on April 14, work across 55 disciplines. They are chosen through a rigorous application and peer-review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants based on both prior career achievement and “exceptional promise,” the foundation said, adding that each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue a project that is meaningful to them under “the freest possible conditions.”
Juana Valdés is a practicing artist whose work spans civic, academic, and international contexts, and who approaches creative production as a form of historical intervention. Shaped by her experience as a Cuban-born, Afro-Latinx woman, immigrant, educator, and conceptual artist, she has developed a practice grounded in the archival poetics of material culture, postcolonial critique, and diasporic memory. For the past ten years, she has served as a professor of Print Media in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her impact as an educator is evident in the artistic development, technical rigor, and critical growth of her students. Through installations, public works, and sculpture, Valdés creates living archives that excavate histories of migration, memory, labor, and resistance embedded in the materials of everyday life. Whether working with bone china, bathymetric mapping, textiles, or public infrastructure, she seeks not only to preserve history, but to activate it, making obscured legacies visible and challenging institutional silences. Her work remains visually expansive, politically engaged, and deeply rooted in diasporic experience. She is deeply honored to be named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026.
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
Since its founding in 1925 by Senator Simon Guggenheim, the Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 Fellows, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors.